


the lines we knew are faded

by Enby_Tiefling



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Codependency, Episode 89, Episode Related, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Past Relationship(s), Pining, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:07:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25627963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enby_Tiefling/pseuds/Enby_Tiefling
Summary: Once upon a time, when they were children, when they banded together because they were rural peasants in a school of heirs and legacies, they'd made plans(or: three sad thirty-something wizards might just fumble their way back together)
Relationships: Astrid/Eodwulf/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 3
Kudos: 38





	1. Chapter 1

She almost doesn't believe him. 

Wulf has always been a good liar, _such a good liar_ and better at spotting them, too, than they were. His odd ducks, he'd called them jokingly like a grandmother. Quiet and strange and particular. And all three of them brilliant, pulling at their leashes and snapping, tearing for more. Always more. Three children from nowhere who were too used to hard winters and harder labour in what passed for summer heat in their corner of the north. 

He was always a good liar, but he promised in the dark under the covers when they were teenagers with bleeding arms that he wouldn't lie to her. He _promised_. 

So she _almost_ doesn't believe him. 

Bren. In the capital. Awake, aware - brilliant again, like they had all been once. Bren. 

Stop. Breathe deeply. Think it through, weigh your options, review your information, _get it right_. 

Bren is here, in the capital, awake and aware and better than they had ever hoped by the end. 

Eodwulf fucks her like they're young again, slow and aching, desperately aware of their missing pieces. She asks him to describe it, every detail - what he said, what he looked like, how he acted. She comes to the description of his fear, the way his voice was steady but his hands trembled, and Wulf lingers on details like the length of his hair and the slope of his neck until he's gasping against her breasts. 

She remembers when his hair was longer, only just past his ears but still enough to run her fingers through. The period between their final test and the beginning of their work, when he was bitter and quietly defiant in ways that didn't count, when he grew out his hair and tattooed his back and talked about ridiculous things like marriage and Tal'dorei. When they were trying to finish a puzzle without the final piece. She runs her hand through the cropped black now, her nails lightly scraping his scalp, thinking. 

"He's so close," Wulf whispers. "And the Magister wants him, we could -"

"He ran," she hisses back, scratching hard behind his ear. "He made his choice -"

"But he's better, I saw it, if we just explain -"

She shoves him off the bed. 

"You're too old to be this naive," she snaps, reaching for the robe hanging from the bedpost and wrapping herself in silk like armour. "If he wanted to be here he wouldn't have run. He wouldn't have killed one of our own to flee." She draws her knees to her chest, because it's just her and Wulf (and the Magister's eyes, always) and she can be human here. Her hand drifts up to her neck. "...He's been at best a memory and at worst a threat for longer than we ever knew him." 

Once upon a time, when they were children, when they banded together because they were rural peasants in a school of heirs and legacies, they'd made plans. Childish, stupid plans, that they'd learn all they could and then go travelling together, that they'd be nomadic mages like characters in pre-Calamity myths. Eodwulf would raise the ruins of Draconia, Astrid would find the sphinxes of Ioun and solve their riddles, Bren would unearth forgotten libraries and translate ancient texts. It all seems so stupid now, the visions of the future they'd had. But it lasted, in shattered and reformed pieces. 

Magister Ikithon rarely lectured at the Academy. Magister Ikithon rarely took private students. Magister Ikithon rarely taught more than two at a time. 

But they were _them_ , a patchwork trio designed for each other. 

(There had been ideas that they would not learn about until much, much later; thoughts of a team that could do more than a single agent, mages who worked together so seamlessly that to fight them would be like facing one powerful being.)

They were always supposed to be together. 

Eodwulf had taken the breaking the hardest. Even when the humour was beaten out of him, when his hope was buried under steel and green glass, he had believed in them. He mediated fights that only got uglier as they grew more desperate under the Magister's training, he held Bren when he needed the pressure to be able to breathe and he would take her out into the night and let her hit him until her arms were too heavy to lift, and then he'd carry her back to bed. 

"He left us," she says into the silence. "Whether he wanted to or not."

Eodwulf stays on the floor. He shuffles back, presses himself into a corner, tries to make himself small. Fails. He's too large, too used to taking up space. She throws a quilt from the end of her bed at him. 

After she dims the lights, but before her pounding heart has settled enough to sleep, she hears him sigh. 

"He's close," he says into the darkness, knowing she won't answer. "We're so close."


	2. Chapter 2

When he knocks on her door -

She doesn't know it's him. Ikithon's man - hers, the Magister had insisted, gifting her a place on his estate - answers the door unknowingly. 

He is _old_. Wulf was right: his hair is long and pulled back and there is already grey at his temples, and his spine is set but his shoulders curl, and his eyes are exactly the same. 

Gods, they're all so old now. She feels the evening's chill in her joints, in the healed splinters of bone. 

She wants to hold him. 

(They're seventeen and he won't stop _screaming_ , he keeps saying that it's all wrong but won't listen to reason, he's dangerous to himself and everyone around him - and she can't go to him, neither of them can since he burned her, since he lost his last scraps of control to his hysteria, but _she wants to hold him_ -)

She reminds herself that she succeeded where he failed, and has succeeded a hundred times more since then. That she is a tarnished, jagged saviour of the Empire, that she is strong, that she doesn't need anyone else anymore. 

Seeing Eodwulf yesterday... Was the first time in weeks that they'd shared more than a passing glance. 

Bren broke, and tore them apart with him. She's spent a long time teaching herself not to be angry with him for it. 

He says he's been dreading this, that he's been thinking of her, that he wants -

To stay away. To be this new man, this stranger in Crick clothes with a familiar rough-spun accent and something like desperation in his voice. He says that he wanted to see her, that he missed her, that he's _dreaded_ her -

And she knows, of course, that she is what she was made to be. That she runs cold because there's nothing warm left in her. 

Maybe she wants it to hurt, just a little, for him to see what he did to her. When she shows him the scars he left, how he ruined her memory of him for years, she wants him to burn. 

He may not be a gibbering madman anymore, but he hasn't made sense since the moments before sending his flames into the summer-dry thatch of his parents' house. Talking to her like she's _innocent_ , like somehow she doesn't know what was done to them in the name of King and Empire. Like if he can convince her that it was wrong then she'll - 

Go with him? 

Would he run, if she went too? If they collected Wulf and vanished into the night and tried to piece themselves back together?

He's so afraid, this man in front of her. 

"And _he_ ," she says, aching to take his hands. "Is just a man, who will one day pass like any other."

She wants to say _I will make it safe for you here again, if that is what you need_. 

She wants to say _if all you hate is him, then he will be gone._

She wants to say -

"You always were ambitious."

He smiles, sad and proud in a stinging, caustic way. 

Their teacher is a cruel, cruel man. She knows this. Knows that it's probable that at least some of her sins were done in service of his own goals rather than the good of the nation that he said she would protect. 

"Bren," she starts, not sure what will come next. He cups her cheek, runs his calloused thumb down one of the scars that nearly killed her. She wants to kiss his hand, to fold him into her despite the difference in height, to pull him upstairs and remind him that he was always supposed to be here. 

Except that he failed. And she is stronger than him, and colder, and crueller. 

"My friends," he says, almost breathing the words like a heretical prayer, like a faceless band of mercenaries could ever mean something. "I should go."

She walks him to the door. She wants to take his hand. She wants to hurt him. Wants to ask what he meant that night, when he babbled about loose threads and layered lies. Wants to keep him. 

"Gute nacht," she says, whispers really, not ready to watch him leave. 

She does. Watch him, that is. Sees the long breath he releases and how he deflates into a bony, ragged beggar. Startles herself with a sharp laugh when he snaps and summons a sleek tabby cat to his shoulders. 

Thinks about ambition, and safety, and strength. 


End file.
